The Language of Law School This page intentionally left blank

Ideology
. An obvious parallel is the constant control of turns and therefore
shaping of ongoing discourse by attorneys and judges. Id.; see also Atkinson and Drew,
Order in Court
.
35. There are actually a variety of possible procedural wrinkles; for example, the case
may have been shaped by the procedures of the administrative agency whose decision is
under review. For ease of reference I use the trial court as a model here.
36. Levi, 
Introduction
.
37. Toulmin, 
The Uses of Argument
, 98–99.
38. As noted in Chapter 2, anthropological linguists would speak of this as an in-
dexical and iconic relationship, drawing from the work of Charles Sanders Peirce. By
“index,” we mean that it carries significance because it points to its meaning in context.
Interestingly, in this case, the language used is also an icon of its meaning; that is, it car-
ries meaning by virtue of a similarity in shape or form (just as, for example, a triangle
can represent a pyramid by virtue of a shared form). See Peirce, 
Collected Papers
; see also
Mertz, “Beyond Symbolic Anthropology.” When these two functions combine to create
an indexical icon—that is, signs carrying meaning both by pointing to context and by
echoing the form of that which they represent—they become particularly potent vehicles
for cultural meanings. See Silverstein, “Metaforces of Power”; Mertz, “Recontextuali-
zation as Socialization.” Silverstein and Parmentier have demonstrated how political
oratory can operate as an indexical icon of the social structure it reinforces. Silverstein,
“Metaforces of Power”; Parmentier, “The Political Function of Reported Speech.” One
interesting implication of this sort of analysis is that the pragmatic structure of language
may, in certain crucial institutionalized situations, work at a level of which speakers are
unaware to make some social outcomes seem natural or inevitable. This subliminal as-
pect of the pragmatic structure of major cultural discourse forms would seem to be of
particular interest in situations where language is used for socialization and the creation
of new social identities.
As we have seen, the structure of classic Socratic classroom discourse mirrors the
ideology it seeks to impart at the same time as it points to aspects of text that are ideologi-
cally significant. If we were to look for the legal equivalent of the “model of the polity”
that is sometimes mirrored and indexed in political rhetoric, the parallel here would be
the core legal model of argumentative discourse as a source of truth. As we will see, this
fundamental trope lies at the heart of the model of justice that is conveyed to law students,
providing epistemological anchoring and normative orientation. In Peircean terms, then,
Socratic classroom discourse is an indexical icon of the worldview it attempts to convey,
and thus can arguably pack a powerful subliminal punch in reorienting students to a new
legal reading of texts.
Notes to Pages 54–58
245

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At the same time, we’ve seen that there is a more subtle way in which the very struc-
ture of Socratic questioning is reflexive, using pragmatic structure in the classroom to
impart a new, heavily indexical orientation to the reading of conflict stories. Here we might
talk of a slightly different dynamic, in which the classroom discourse’s indexical structure
teaches through a reflexive mirroring (as opposed, for example, to teaching through a more
semantico-referential “explanation” of what it seeks to convey). At this more local level,
then, we might talk of a kind of 
iconic indexical
 structure to classroom discourse, just in
the sense that it reorients students through a mirroring indexical calibration of classroom
discourse to the metapragmatics of a new textual ideology. Arguably, then, there is a double
indexical mirroring of legal-discursive structures occurring through Socratic method teach-
ing. This would only further reinforce a sense of fit between the classic pedagogy and what
it seeks to impart, regardless of its actual efficacy.
39. There is, however, an interesting commonality between Collins’s lowest status
group and the law school class analyzed in this section; in both, there is arguably a break
with the “liberal” notion that semantic meaning is what a text is all about. Instead, the
meaning of texts lies in the pragmatic orientation that teachers impart through regiment-
ing classroom speech. At the same time, there is an obvious difference between highest
and lowest status classrooms. The low-ability students are taught to submit to the text—
to pronounce it and nothing else—whereas the law student’s pragmatic discipline is aimed
at mastery and manipulation. In exploring contrasts among such differing social settings
and approaches to text, we can begin to see the relation between social power and the regi-
mentation of text, enacted in the critical process of socialization to text through the de-
and recentering of written texts in classroom speech. We can also see that it would be a
mistake to read transparently from discourse form to social function.
40. Although the parallel is striking, I do not mean to imply here any transparent
continuity between the discourse style of the classroom and the discourses used in legal
practice of various kinds. Rather, the classroom discourse is a semiotic disciplining to a
new form of reading and discursively organizing written texts, and this form of reading
will of course be multiply recontextualized in the various speech settings of legal practice.
41. See Chapter 6. In